Johnson: When there's a need, O.C. people step up

This is often difficult to see amid the bustle, constant sunshine glare and non-stop traffic delays of everyday life. But when you get to sit back, look at it up close the way I am fortunate to do, it is awe inspiring.

I wrote the other day of Joyce Baker, an 81-year-old woman who had been beaten down by life. All that she wanted was the carpeting and a few walls in her Cypress home repaired properly. Those she had counted on to do it disappointed her, laughed at her.

Telling the everyday stories of people I meet or who contact me is what brings me joy. Sometimes they connect with others, sometimes not.

The reaction to the story of Joyce Baker simply astounds me.

The telephone calls and the emails are still arriving daily.

“How can I help her?”

That is what everyone wanted to know. No, you do not understand.

Her story appeared here on Saturday. By Monday morning, there had to be more than 40 emails awaiting me. My voicemail inbox was full. I wish you could have heard them all.

There were calls from construction companies, handymen and simple, everyday folks, all wanting to run out, pull up Joyce Baker's carpeting and replace it before taking on her flood-soaked walls and bathroom vanities.

Others chided me – I will never forget this one elderly gentleman who called twice – for not identifying her insurance company and the contractors who did the shoddy, expensive work in her home.

That was never the point, people.

The calls that still stick came from people, young and old, who said they didn't have money to give her, but simply wanted to be Joyce Baker's friend. A woman who runs a Girl Scout troop offered to take her charges to the woman's home one weekend, clean up, sit with her, bring a smile to her face.

On Tuesday, I bundled up all of the messages, and drove out to Cypress. Joyce Baker doesn't have a computer.

“What is all this?” she asked when I pulled up and handed her the stacks of email and messages. She was still in her pajamas. People care about you, I told her. Call them.

Joyce Baker cried.

Nancy Clark was among those who called, too, wanting to help. You may remember her, how I wrote of her quest to find Kamba, her 60-pound tortoise, who escaped from her Newport Beach backyard last month.

She, too, was heartbroken, and was offering a $1,000 reward for the tortoise's return. More than 100 people contacted her after the story appeared. Calls are still arriving.

“From such lovely people,” she said the other day, her black Chihuahua, Miss Cookie, still ensconced in her lap.

“The most amazing thing to me is no one cared about the reward,” she said. “They just wanted to help me.”

She and her husband, John, have driven all over Orange County in response to Kamba sightings, from La Habra to Anaheim and Los Alamitos and points way south.

“In Los Alamitos, this man was out walking one night when, out in the street, this tortoise appeared,” she said. “We drove down there. It wasn't ours.

“But I was blown away by the response, how concerned everyone was,” the 64-year-old woman said. “It's why I'm not giving up and maintaining my optimism.”

There are two people she knows, she said, and both are what she called “psychically sensitive.” One told her Kamba was taken by someone “with intention” – not actually stolen, but by someone who likes him and has no plans to return him.

The other simply told her Kamba was nearby, but was being receiving good care.

Does any of that help?

“A little,” she said, adding it could be worse.

One man told her of losing two tortoises, both of which died. One tried to crawl over a log, flipped on its back and could not right itself. The other crawled beneath his home. Much later, all he found under the house was a shell.

“I didn't need to hear that,” Nancy Clark said. “But then one man told me his tortoise one day disappeared, and two years later it came back, walking down the street.”

And then, last Friday arrived.

A couple about a mile away in Costa Mesa called. A tortoise had walked into their backyard from the alley. Please come, they told her. She and John rushed over.

The tortoise was covered in mud. It was Kamba! she told John.

“I had an envelope with Kamba's name on it and $1,000 inside it. The man didn't want it. I couldn't get him to take it. He said he was just glad I came because Kamba was eating all of his geraniums.”

Back home, the first sign of trouble arrived when the tortoise did not fit in Kamba's usual corner next to the buffet in the living room. When Miss Cookie and the other dogs ran up to the tortoise to welcome it back home, the tortoise hissed at them.

“I knew right then, but I pretended not to know,” Nancy Clark said. “This one is afraid of people. When I come out to give it a banana, she hides her head. Mine, when you come out with one, it goes ‘Yay!'”

She and John took it into the backyard, and washed the layers of mud off the tortoise. It had on its shell what Kamba did not – a deep gouge.

“Had I seen that in Costa Mesa, I would have known immediately it was not mine,” she said.

So the tortoise today walks Nancy Clark's backyard. The search for Kamba continues.

She will make new signs to place in the neighborhood with more information about Kamba.

“He has to be somewhere,” she says. “Somebody has him.” Again she asks that I print her telephone number: 949-400-5340.

So what of this new tortoise, I ask. Knowing the type of fanatic, animal-loving and animal-rescuing person that she is, I already kind of knew the answer.

“To be honest,” she said sheepishly, “if I don't find my Kamba, I want to keep him.”